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Kate Charlesworth's graphic narrative Sensible Footwear: A Girl's Guide (2019), part memoir and part documentary of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex life and activism in the United Kingdom from 1950 to 2019, remembers the time when the LGBTQI+ and feminist movements met and influenced each other deeply, namely in lesbian feminism of the 1970s and 1980s. Drawing on feminist historiography and memory studies, this article discusses the role the figure of the lesbian has played in the collective memory of lesbian feminism. With a focus on the expressive capacities of comics, it examines how the work revisits this figure at a time when women's and LGBTQI+ rights face a backlash led by anti-gender campaigners, some of whom draw on discourses associated with lesbian feminism. It concludes that the work challenges dominant narratives about the relationship between lesbian, queer, and trans feminism and enables a reconsideration of these movements as parts of a common political project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the Marxist-Feminist Theses III and VIII. It is based on the 'French-speaking materialist feminist' theoretical perspective that has been developed at the end of the 1970s by Colette Guillaumin (with the concept of 'sexage'), Monique Wittig (with the concept of 'straight mind'), Nicole-Claude Mathieu, Christine Delphy and other members of the Nouvelles Questions Féministes journal's board. The article first presents this theorization, which is too unknown to many English-speaking theorists. It then shows how 'French-speaking materialist feminist' theoretical perspective fully demonstrated that 'sex' was a structural social relation as much as class is (Gender relations are relations of production). The article also analyses how this theoretical perspective enables us to pay a deep attention to the 'race question'. Therefore, it appears as the missing link that can help bridging at least two important theoretical and political gaps: first, between Marxist feminism and lesbian theory, and, second, between Black feminism and Marxist feminism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paradoxical person of the Lesbian-Feminist exists as an intersectional being, living both within the world of the feminist movement and within the queer movement. The feminist movement seeks to deconstruct patriarchy and harmful gender binaries that have perpetually disenfranchised women. When studying queer theory, it becomes clear that the main goal of the queer movement is to deconstruct binaries and gender roles in their totality. This project is unique as it attempts to identify the Lesbian-Feminist as the space in which both of these movements coexist. The Lesbian-Feminist is concerned with both bringing about the full equality of women and working for the full inclusion of LGBTQ people in politics, society, and the church. This research will be situated within the context of theological discourse as we think of the revolution in relation to the person and work of Jesus. Jesus dismantled unjust systems and harmful hierarchal power dynamics and, in doing so, showed us how to truly be the kin-dom of God on earth. Jesus exemplified justice, love, and radical equality, attributes that Christians do not always exemplify as they tend to perpetuate the dominant social structure with its leader, the white, heterosexual, Christian male. The work of the liberation theologian, specifically that of the queer or the feminist theologian, carries on the work of Jesus by continuing to dismantle and disrupt these dominant power structures and social constructions that exclude and deny the full humanity of anyone who is in the margins. Just as Jesus held full equality in divinity and humanity, the Lesbian-Feminist incarnates God's presence in the world in both her queerness and her womanhood. It seems clear from the recent surge in misogynistic, crassly anti-woman rhetoric and behavior in our culture that there remains a significant amount of work to be done and that we do not live in a post-sexist society. The reaction and resurgence that was the 2017 Women's March brings to light and rebels against all that seeks to keep us divided along lines of gender, race, and socio-economics. The March, as a gathering of the margins, was a chorus of voices making clear that we will not allow sexism, racism, homophobia, and xenophobia to turn this country backward. Therein lies the importance of the Lesbian-Feminist, that as an intersectional force bringing together two movements, she also brings together the entire revolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractWomen of the early baby boom years in the U.S. came out into an environment in which same-sex desire was stigmatized and criminalized. For working-class lesbians, the bar scene provided an environment in which women could find companionship and a way to live a life decoupled from traditional heterosexual roles. For middle class women, bar life was fraught with legal and social risk, and some–mostly white–women worked to establish a more “socially acceptable” communal life through organizations such as the Daughters of Bilitis. As the women’s movement flourished in the late 1960s and 1970s, women born in the early years of the baby boom (1946–1950) created distinctive lesbian feminist cultures and identities. In contrast to early baby boomers, women born at the tail end of the baby boom (1960–1964) came out in a vastly different cultural context. Second-wave feminism had already peaked, the AIDS epidemic and debates about sexuality changed the context for lesbian identity and activism, and organizing by women of color created the development of an intersectional view of lesbian identity and activism. Through an analysis of feminist magazines, newsletters, and texts of the late 1960s through the 1990s, this paper explores the cultural contexts through which radical lesbian feminist identities arose and, for a period, flourished in the U.S. By the end of the 1980s and 1990s, as second-wave feminism declined, lesbian feminist identity shifted. Over the last decades of the twentieth century, new queer forms of identification emerged, coupled with a decline of lesbian identification among younger people. I argue that these new forms represent both continuity and disruption with earlier forms of lesbian identification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractThe contemporary preoccupation with lesbian’s potential obsolescence relies on implicit assumptions about the (ir)relevance of lesbian feminism to younger generations. In this article, we use the metaphor of “generation loss” to conceptualize the Gordian knot of affective and ideological ties that lie beneath this preoccupation. Contrary to the narrative of generation loss, we show how young people have begun to take up and share lesbian feminist concepts on social media platforms like TikTok. They do so in the name of resituating lesbian as a political project rather than an exclusionary demographic category. Instead of painting over lesbian feminism with the broad brushes of whiteness and trans-exclusivity, some young lesbians seek out other voices in the archive to debate whether and how this history might be recuperated as a challenge to white, cisnormative heteropatriarchy. Far from finding irrelevance, many revisiting lesbian feminism are excited to discover theories of gender, sexuality, and power that can be adapted to relocate lesbian to more durable and less essentializing territory than its current, narrowly biopolitical home. This presents a crucial opportunity to build bridges across generations and collectively resist the cooptation of lesbians as agents of white supremacist and transphobic political agendas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on a content analysis of a compilation album released in the early years of the women's music community, we find that music aids in the construction of collective identities by bridging the individual and collective. The women's music community was a part of lesbian feminism and emerged in the mid-1970s and was centered around the concerts, festivals and production and consumption of music. We analyze individual themes of pride in/claiming a lesbian identity, romantic yearning to illustrate how musicians and poets presented lesbian lives and loves as desirable and without stigma. We examine how collective themes that acknowledged societal homophobia and encouraged group resistance created a sense of community and a need for change. We argue that music played a key role in the construction of a positive lesbian feminist identity in a time of homophobia and discrimination. We find that this process provides a framework for understanding how music can play a role in the construction of positive collective identities in times of societal bias and/or backlash. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The clothes worn by lesbians are rich in meaning. Sometimes, they can help us to understand lesbian history and the social, personal, political, and erotic context of lesbian lives in the past. As LGBTQ communities have grown and the connections between groups within it have become at once stronger and more complicated, the clothes that lesbians (and others) wear can function as narrators. Lesbian fashion can be a tool for solidarity, our ideals worn quite literally on our sleeves. This paper is an analysis of how clothing has been - and is being - used by lesbians to show support for other groups within LGBTQ communities, through a fashion history lens. The focus is on printed t-shirts as well as clothing in different Pride flag colours, which I propose can be understood as a kind of "flagging." Flagging, here, is a way to understand the intentional choices made by lesbians and other LGBTQ + people when signalling personal identities and intra-community solidarities through dress. When solidarity activism is placed directly onto the lesbian body, it is personal, and can craft specific messages. These messages, constructed from a language of identities, visual culture, and physical garments, are what this paper seeks to examine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 1970s, in the wake of the Women’s liberation movement and the hippie back- to-the land movement, some women bought plots of land all over the United States and founded what they called ‘lesbian lands’, i.e. women-only separatist communities. Some of them continue to exist today, and are still inhabited by self-called ‘landykes.’ Based on in-person semi-directed interviews conducted in November 2021 and August 2022 with nine women living or having lived on lesbian lands in the same geographical area, this paper investigates their definition of ‘woman’ and how it circumscribes the limits of their community. This paper first argues for a nuanced revision of what radical lesbianism means in these rural lesbian separatist spaces and then proceeds to demonstrate how ‘woman’ has become resignified over the years, de facto barring trans women and challenging lesbian- identified trans men’s place within their community.Correction noticeThe initially published version of this article includes a number of details about the otherwise anonymized participants. Upon revaluation, the participants feared these elements could put their anonymity at risk, and requested corrections to be made to the article to safeguard their privacy. Hence, certain elements of the article were corrected. Throughout the document, all details marked by the participants as potentially identifying information have been edited to further anonymize the community studied, and several line edits have been made to clarify the author’s descriptive intent. No further changes have been made to the article, and neither its substance nor its conclusions have been altered.

Ulrike Müller's Herstory Inventory (HI) is a collection of over one hundred works on paper by "feminist" artists who were given "drawing assignments" that began with textual prompts taken from an archival list of T‐shirts that Müller discovered in the collections of the Lesbian Herstory Archives (LHA). HI has also had multiple incarnations as a staged reading/live performance, audio installation, collective art project, art exhibition, and book, and its relay across media participates in a fascination with the archive that has pervaded LGBTQ culture, resulting in a proliferation of new archives that is one manifestation of the "archival turn." This essay focuses on how Müller's HI uses the LHA as a point of departure for a creative practice that not only opens lesbian feminist archives to new visibility and new publics but also creates a transgenerational dialogue around lesbian feminist politics and representation — both honoring and reviving its history and subjecting it to critique. HI's engagement with the LHA's lesbian feminist commitment to archival autonomy provides an interesting case history for radical archival politics, as tensions between counterarchives and archival critique get played out through the tensions between lesbian and queer feminisms. Returning to the politics of representation and visibility that have been so central and vexing in lesbian feminism, HI puts art practices in conversation with archival ones. The project approaches the archive through abstraction and drawing, both practices of representation that resist the realisms of documentary media such as film and photography, to enact a queer politics of visibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though there is evidence of an historical exclusion of trans women from lesbian feminist separatist spaces supported by radical feminist lesbian anti-trans discourse as well as modern examples of anti-trans perspectives promoted by feminists sometimes described as Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists, it remains unclear as to if there is a significant association between being a lesbian cis woman feminist and harboring negative attitudes toward trans women or alternatively, if the recent proliferation of exclusionary tactics directed toward trans women's rights (especially via social media) has been the result of loud voices among a minority who have been successful anti-trans mouthpieces as of late. The current study utilizes survey data (N = 1461 cis women; n = 331 lesbian cis women) to investigate the following research questions: (1) do lesbian cis women feminists express greater levels of negativity toward trans women than other cis women (heterosexual, bisexual, pansexual, and asexual) do? and (2) is there a relationship between feminist identity among lesbian cis women and the stigmatization of trans women (as undeserving of rights, as incapable parents/mothers, as excluded from the military, and as sexually problematic)? Results provide ample evidence of anti-trans perspectives among some lesbian cis women feminists. Overall, the findings provide a starting point to begin to understand how to dismantle the complexities embedded in the relationships between feminism, lesbian identity, and trans negativity and work toward a trans-inclusive future of feminism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article theorizes the lesbian feminist killjoy’s negativity in order to elucidate the temporal, affective, and redemptive politics found within feminist and queer collective memory by bringing Conditions: Five and Beverly Smith’s “The Wedding” into conversation with Lisa Duggan and Nan Hunter’s Sex Wars. I show how progress narratives presume the unattractiveness of lesbian feminism while investing queerness with the capacity to overcome lesbian feminism’s racial and class exclusions. To counter the way progress narratives’ division between good and bad subjects endows contemporary scholarship with a fantasy of innocence, I consider how the lesbian feminist killjoy might be attractive enough to provoke alternative desires. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historically, there has been a schism between lesbian and bisexual women that was largely embedded in the rigid rules of the 1970s lesbian feminist movement. Yet while the overt separatist tactics of lesbian feminism that once excluded bisexual women have largely faded away, the current study demonstrates continued evidence of fractures between L (lesbian) v. (B) bisexual women using data from a sample of U.S. adults aged 18-64 stratified by U.S. census categories of age, gender, race/ethnicity and census region collected from online panelists (lesbian women, n = 346; bisexual women, n = 358) and a partial test of Norm-Centered Stigma Theory (NCST) with an emphasis on feminist identity. Specifically, lesbian women's negativity toward bisexual women (looking at measures of authenticity, unfaithfulness, and hypersexuality) is more pronounced than bisexual women's negativity toward lesbian women; however, the findings demonstrate that today's negativity toward bisexual women may not be embedded in feminism as it once was. In addition, the results suggest that feminism may mean something different to bisexual women in comparison to lesbian women (which perhaps may be related to differences in investments in queer activism). Overall, by using NCST's theoretical framework that focuses on the intersecting roles of sexuality, gender, and feminist identity to investigate lesbian women's stigma toward bisexual women and bisexual women's stigma toward lesbian women, this research offers insight into working toward the ultimate goal of ameliorating these schisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the work of Dutch women in transnational lesbian organizing during the 1980s and 1990s, with a particular focus on the crucial role they played in establishing the International Lesbian Information Service (ILIS), an early offshoot of the International Gay Association (later ILGA). Drawing upon organizational records, personal papers, and published accounts in the gay and lesbian press, it shows how and why Dutch women became a potent force on the international scene, leveraging organizational resources available in the Netherlands in order to build coalitions and to support the expansion of lesbian political networks around the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the experimentalism and utopianism of Australian lesbian feminist culture during the 1970s and 1980s. I draw upon a selection of oral histories with lesbian activists to provide a more in-depth account of lesbian feminism's expansive trajectory in Australia during this period. As I show, Australian lesbian feminists imagined and enacted radical change through their kinship and chosen-family networks, their self-sufficient remote communities, and through the autonomous spaces they established to work and create alongside each other. In doing this, they endeavoured to live in a variety of ways that, they hoped, would transform themselves and broader society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the 1970s and 1980s, a number of predominantly white, working- and middle-class women from across Europe, Australasia, North America and elsewhere travelled across the globe, establishing short or longer-term residence in rural and urban separatist communities. This article explores the role of these women in disseminating post-68 feminist ideas and literature, as well as in the creation of transnational lesbian feminist networks. Drawing on oral history interviews and feminist literature, this work traces these networks and explores some of the central ideological concerns of rural women's lands and the ways in which these differed between specific locations in Australia, Wales and Denmark. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1976, a small group of lesbian feminists in Amsterdam named themselves after Jill Johnston's Lesbian Nation: The Feminist Solution (1973) and imagined a separate lesbian society, free from heteropatriarchal oppression. Despite naming themselves after Johnston, Lesbian Nation's main aim was inspired by French feminist theorist Monique Wittig: to subvert the existing symbolic order, and create a new one in its wake. Based on archival research and interviews, this article shows how Lesbian Nation combined both lesbian separatist and cultural feminist tendencies, by experimenting with lesbian identity and creating a women's culture. Discussing the similarities and differences between Lesbian Nation and its predecessor, Paarse September, this article illustrates how lesbian organising evolved in the Netherlands. More broadly, this article adds to lesbian feminist historiography, showing how a small group shaped their own lesbian feminist ideology – and brought this into practice – on a local scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article traces connections between child sexual abuse survivors' narratives written by lesbian feminists in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and those written by Christian ex-lesbians in the 1990s and early 2000s. Many scholars have recognized the extent to which an anti-feminist countermovement led by the False Memory Syndrome Foundation stymied the gains of child sexual abuse survivor activists. But we have not yet examined the ways other opponents of feminism and lesbian feminism, in particular, weaponized child sexual abuse survivors' narratives in order to delegitimate lesbian identity. This latter response to the child sexual abuse survivors' movement was perhaps even more dangerous and effective in resisting feminist demands than the false memory movement's rejection. Embracing aspects of feminists' analyses of childhood sexual abuse crucially enabled Christian ex-gay and ex-lesbian leaders to portray their approach to sexual conversion as based in love, concern, and support for homosexuals and to frame lesbians as wounded, sympathetic, and in need of help. By couching their messages of conversion in therapeutic language that echoed earlier feminist arguments, ex-gay leaders increased the appeal and accessibility of their texts. As struggles against sexual violence have recently achieved a tremendous degree of public visibility, this history serves as a timely and sobering reminder that testimonies of sexual violence can serve conservative as well as liberating political purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay provides a critical personal reflection contemplating a 2006 Mexico City-based cross- border dialogue in which sharp divisions emerged between a set of Mexicana lesbianas—declaring their pro-lesbian feminist and anti-queer politics—and a set of queer Chicanas- Latinas—pronouncing their queer women of color politics. The vexing exchange occurred on the eve of the 3rd annual Marcha Lésbica, an explicitly radical lesbian feminist political gathering and at the time the largest public action of its kind to be held in Latin America. I draw new insights about key historical and contemporary lesbian political identity issues by reviewing how Mexican lesbian politics informed by feminism and critiques of neoliberalism produced challenges to the U.S. based participants. I reframe the value of the lesbian Mexicanas' "anti- queer" proclamation, an affective statement especially unpopular in that period given the provincializing glance at lesbian politics and identity in the U.S. Finally, I revisit this difficult moment to historicize how lesbian remains a freighted category of political identity for Chicanas-Latinas who abide by women of color and trans coalitional politics, while it also opens up affinities for meaningful though precarious cross-border identifications. This multilayered reflection argues for a situated understanding of the meanings that can be ascribed to lesbian identity and politics, which are highly contingent upon spatio-temporalities. Thus, the category "lesbian" is replete with instructive energies whether as an affective critique of queer epistemologies that move along a Global North to Global South axis, or as a reminder of the limits of coalitional politics built across nation-state borders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Queer pioneers Gloria Anzaldúa, Marlon Riggs, and David Wojnarowicz provide twenty-first-century queers a life-giving model of embodied queer generosity, a model that centers material vulnerability and rhetorical resistance. Focusing on three canonical texts (Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera, Riggs’ Tongues Untied, and Wojnarowicz’s Close to the Knives), this article describes how these three artists make manifest Anzaldúa and Moraga’s “theory in the flesh.” Reading these works through the lenses of Ahmed’s lesbian feminism, Hallas’s conception of witnessing, and Lorde’s demand for diversity and dialectic, I argue that Anzaldúa, Riggs, and Wojnarowicz’s insistence on the plural queer subject/coalition is necessary for queer survival, not only in the 1980s’ open season on queers but for contemporary queer futurity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article takes up the commonplace antagonism between 'second wave' lesbian feminism and 'third wave' queer theory and politics, and argues that the antagonism itself is both historically and politically reductive. First, I make the case that 'third wave' queer theory actually shares its central concern – namely, accountability for intra-group inequalities – with lesbian feminism. However, I argue that 'third wave' queer theories ultimately founder in their bid for a more reflexive political praxis by tending to hold others – lesbian feminists – accountable for ongoing inequalities rather than grappling with them directly. By contrast, I show that lesbian feminists from the late 1970s to the late 1980s developed a reparative politics that succeeds where 'third wave' theories stumble by developing relationships of mutual accountability around issues of race and racism, and by establishing processes by which to repair these relationships when they founder. I conclude by arguing that a fuller attention to the history of lesbian feminism, in fact, offers important resources for feminists and queers dealing with issues of intra-group marginalization, such as transphobia, in the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to offer a reparative framework for current feminist approaches, most of which seek to inhabit rather than assimilate previous forms of inclusivity or intersectionality, by vindicating the pioneering role of past feminisms. For this purpose, I will stick to a double-edged methodological tool that has been an object of dispute in feminist and literary studies for the last decades, namely, critique and postcritique, two concepts that could be said to bear witness to old and new ways of doing feminism. My aim is not to dismiss recent feminist work but to render visible forgotten critiques that have been an essential heritage of feminism. To acknowledge such debts is part of the reparative reading I present here, for I hold that the desire for deep knowledge is accretive and demands a closer and more respectful attention to past practices and theoretical positions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We argue that historical femme life writing forms a rich resource for femme theory that contributes to, challenges, and extends contemporary academic femme literature. We focus on the experiences of femmes during the second-wave feminist movement, specifically within the context of 1970s and 1980s U.S. lesbian feminism. The texts we examine include My Dangerous Desires by Amber Hollibaugh (2000), A Restricted Country by Joan Nestle (1987), Minnie Bruce Pratt's (1995) S/he, and selections from The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader, edited by Nestle (1992). Informed by Clare Hemmings' (2011) and Victoria Hesford's (2013) critiques that past feminisms are often retold using reductive narratives, we (re)read this femme life writing to foreground the ways in which femmes have historically troubled and resisted monolithic accounts of lesbian feminism, lesbian identities, femininity, and sexuality. By centering queer feminine voices from this period to highlight major themes of this life writing, and drawing on Andi Schwartz's (2018) positioning of femme cultural production as a basis for theory, we argue that earlier iterations of queer femininities are relevant to and important for contemporary femme theory. Ultimately, we analyze what historical femme life writing reveals about the place of femininity within the lesbian and feminist communities of their time, how these dynamics inform current perceptions of queer and femme politics, and how femmes resist their cultural and critical marginalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lesbians and other queer women are typically absent from theorizations of boy band fandom even though boy bands often have sizable lesbian fan bases. Lesbian fandom of the British–Irish boy band One Direction congregated primarily on Tumblr; this fandom constituted a queer community space that exposed the boy band as a site of lesbian erotic and creative energy. One manifestation of lesbian One Direction fandom was the drag king performance group known as Every Direction, which maintained an active Tumblr page in addition to performing live drag king renditions of popular One Direction songs. Interviews with the group's members, along with a content analysis of lesbian Tumblr fandom of One Direction, illuminate the significant creative output of this understudied fan community. This phenomenon is placed into conversation with the lesbian feminist–affiliated Women's Music Movement of the 1970s, which had a lasting impact on popular conceptions of lesbian musical preferences in the United States. I argue that lesbian One Direction fandom constitutes a contemporary queer political intervention that reworks lesbian feminist political tactics and priorities. This data acts as a record of the lesbian One Direction fan community that congregated on Tumblr during the band's heyday, as well as an intervention in scholarly theorizations of lesbian fans and fan practices.

This article chronicles the formation of the Atlanta Lesbian Feminist Alliance (ALFA) and its creative grassroots activism from 1972 to 1975. Studying ALFA offers a critical window into how lesbian feminists were envisioning political organizing, coalition building, and sports in the New South. ALFA utilized radical strategies learned in prior movements, from antiwar to civil rights activism, to create a lesbian feminist politic in Little Five Points, Atlanta. Drawing on oral histories, this essay studies ALFA activism to challenge media coverage of lesbian and gay life, pass the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), utilize the "softball strategy," and build regional networks through the Great Southeast Lesbian Conference. ALFA involvement in campaigns to pass the ERA highlight the complexities of coalition building in the women's movement. ALFA's creation of an out-lesbian softball team in 1974, which widened membership and raised visibility, demonstrates the use of recreation as an organizing tool. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the contested feminist visions at the lesbian feminist event, the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival (MichFest), particularly on feminism, gender and women. Also cited are the works of Finn Enke and Clare Hemmings on feminism and feminists, the concept of lesbian feminist separatism, and the works of the group Transgender Women Belong Here (TWBH).

Drawing on letters and writings by teenage girls and oral history interviews, this article aims to open a scholarly conversation about the existence and significance of intergenerational sexual relationships between minor girls and adult women in the years leading up to and encompassing the lesbian feminist movement of the 1970s. Lesbian history and culture say very little about sexual connections between youth and adults, sweeping them under the rug in gender-inflected ways that differ from the suppression of speech in gay male history and culture about intergenerational sex between boys and men. Nonetheless, my research suggests that, despite lesbian feminists' caution and even negativity toward teen girls, erotic and sexual relationships with adult women provided girls access to support, pleasure, mentorship, and community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two leading southern urban centers, Charlotte, North Carolina and Atlanta, Georgia, are connected by their competing notions of metropolitan identities as put forward by city leaders. Both serve as home to lesbians who define themselves in accordance with their urban surroundings. In 1970s Charlotte and Atlanta, lesbian feminists established spaces, formed organizations, held conferences, created print media outlets, and worked to define a visible community essentially linked to the urban identity of each city. This article demonstrates that while Atlanta is often recognized as the primary location of southern women's activism, equally important and enduring lesbian-feminist action took place in Charlotte. A small but overlooked group of activists in Charlotte left a permanent mark on the collective lesbian-feminist landscape, and by examining the development of lesbian-feminist groups in these two cities, we understand the significance of southern lesbian action on the national stage of women's history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Looking from a critical race perspective at Wittig's lesbian, in this article, I draw two conclusions. First, I suggest that it is actually trans exclusionary lesbians' own transphobia that makes them cis-gendered. And second, it becomes clear that the politicisation of choosing and refusing gender needs to acknowledge racism's shaping role in the construction of gender. My approach not only intervenes in transphobic feminisms that are obsessed with simplistic understandings of sexual violence, but also questions rigid cis/trans binaries and rejects accounts of trans/gender that ignore the role of racialisation for the emergence of gender. The main question that I address is: how to conceptualise the complex im/possibilities of refusing and choosing in relation to gender? It is my aim to connect seemingly disparate knowledge productions on genderqueer, trans and other 'impossible' genders and sexualities. I am particularly interested in a phenomenon that can be described as 'lesbian haunting': the ambivalences one will find in tracing lesbian theory in relation to transing gender. With this, it is my attempt to rethink lesbian, queer and trans feminist approaches on violence, and to investigate the role of sexual violence within broader concepts of violence. More specifically, in order to understand both 'gender' and 'transing gender' as always already racialised, my approach builds on theories that identify 'ungendering' as an effect of normative racial violence (e.g. Spillers, 1987; Lewis, 2017; Snorton, 2017). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 2000s, general and academic concern in openly non-monogamous styles of relating has increased. In Spain, the rise in the general interest toward non-monogamy, meeting groups, and activism has become apparent during the current decade. One of the practical and theoretical paradigms that has been developed within non-monogamy is relationship anarchy. In this article, I will approach relationship anarchy in three different ways: as a philosophy of love, as a way of structuring affective bonds, and as a political philosophy. I shall then focus on the last one: relationship anarchy as a political philosophy, and what can be gained from thinking relationship anarchy from a queer, feminist perspective. I intend to make a theoretical contribution to the discourse of relationship anarchy as a political philosophy from feminist criticism of monogamy and of the naturalization of love; from the premises of lesbian feminism, compulsory heterosexuality, and the erotic pyramid; and from the concept of amatonormativity and sex-centrism in asexual theory. I shall then consider the usefulness of the relationship anarchy paradigm for radical queer politics in the current Spanish context. Finally, I will raise the concepts of the pyramid of relationships and the continuum (between attractions) system to pose how the different hierarchies that relationship anarchy puts in question are linked: amatonormativity, sex-centrism, and couple privilege. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay offers an extended consideration of Cherríe Moraga and Amber Hollibaugh's dialogue "What We're Rollin Around in Bed With" to investigate questions about collectivity and consensus, duration, disappointment and reinvestment, vulnerability, and the suffocating effects of idealization in political practice. The essay meditates on co-writing, coupledom, collectivity, dialogue, consciousness raising, and pedagogy, which, each in their turn, offer methods for staging "staying with the trouble." The essay advocates for reinvigorating Moraga and Hollibaugh's commitment to "using feelings as theory," a way of drawing upon lesbian experience for feminist politics that occupies the dialogic, descriptive, cobbled together particularities of the hyphen between theory-practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 1970s magazines, journals and periodicals constituted an alternative public sphere for second wave feminism. These publications provide an index—and at times the only documentation—of the activities of the women's art movement as well as its many iterations and divisions. This article addresses this imbalance, arguing that Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics (1977–1992) was exemplar of the radical political challenge feminism posed to the art world and culture more broadly. Launched in 1977 by the Heresies mother collective, which included Joan Braderman, Mary Beth Edelson, Lucy R. Lippard, Harmony Hammond and May Stevens among others, the magazine had thematic issues edited by different collectives and was comprised of material from an open call. Content ranged from poetry, to academic essays, to artworks both original and reproduced. This article considers the collaborative process of producing the magazine, which attempted to be inclusive, but in fact came to mirror the divisions—as well as political investments—of the broader women's movement, alongside the dissensus the publication provoked and attempted to confront. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this research is to contribute to the field of Lesbian Studies in South America, tracing a cartography with the genealogies of lesbian feminist thinkers in Latin America. It is framed in critical decolonial feminism, heir to the work of Margarita Pisano, Yuderkys Espinosa Miñoso, Ochy Curiel, Norma Mogrovejo and val flores. The specificity of lesbian experience can be better studied through a cartographic approach that prioritizes, following Clare Hemmings, juxtaposition over displacement, genealogy over linear history, transition over permanence. The methodological approach is Participatory Action Research. Our map starts with the foundation of the lesbian collective "Ultravioletas" in Mendoza (Argentina), and reaches international borders. We propose a critical analysis of "Ultravioletas"' theoretical and political contributions. The current context marked by the scarce production of lesbian theory - due to the hegemony of "mainstream heterofeminism" and the LGBTIQ movement (mostly inspired in queer theory) - makes the study necessary. After a first approach to the field, we believe that the genealogy to be reconstructed has more relation with the French materialist feminism and the intersectional feminism of Chicana writers (as Cherrie Moraga, Gloria Anzaldúa), than with queer theory. Hence, they are productions oriented to political praxis. The result of our work will be, first, a genealogy of lesbian feminism, representing its traces, relationships and dialogues with other feminisms in a map. Second, the construction of new storing devices, which will make more accessible situated debates about lesbians and heterosexuality in the South. The results are understood as mnemo-technical devices for interrupting the politics of hegemonic memory - both heterocis- patriarchal and feminist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Applying theories of voice, feminist film and extratextual media studies, and queer rhetorical memory, this article considers how lesbian feminism in the American second-wave feminist movement is remembered in the 2013 documentary film MAKERS: The Women Who Make America. The film minimizes and omits the voices of lesbian women, thereby overlooking the queer memories they express of the feminist movement. Many of these voices are only made accessible through the MAKERS official website, and thus, they become examples of "queer mnemonic voice-outtakes" whose containment on the MAKERS website aids in the negation of queer memories of the feminist past. However, this article also finds that queer feminist memory is presented only through white lesbian women, as the voices of black lesbian feminists featured in MAKERS never provide their own insights into how their sexuality influenced their feminist politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]